(Letter to the Editor - Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)

God does not cherish fetuses or children.

God demanded the sacrifice of all firstborn livestock and sons. (Exodus 34:19) This requirement was just to remind people — the survivors — of God’s proud action against the Pharaoh, whose heart He had deliberately hardened (Exodus10:27), in which God struck all the firstborn in Egypt from the Pharaoh’s son to that of his prisoners, and all the firstborn of the livestock (Exodus 12:29). It was God’s justice.

God spurred the ethnic cleansing of the promised land, listing six bedouin tribes for destruction, promising to “blot them out” (Exodus 23:23,26). Tens of thousands were “smote with the edge of the sword.” And love smitten, apparently, because God later ordered that captured wives and their children be cast out (Ezra 10:44). Those unattached women were then considered of ill repute and likely to be stoned even though the children were of their captors.

Later, God punished Israel by having Assyria enslave them. “Now Ephraim must lead out his children for slaughter. … Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts” (Hosea 9:13-14).

I believe the Hebrews practiced female infanticide like the Greeks. So many men were killed in battle that the survivors had many wives; they needed soldiers, not women; food was more scarce in “the land of milk and honey” than in Greece; nobody wanted daughters to feed. There were plenty of mates from other nations: Wise Solomon imported 700 wives for his brain trust and 300 concubines as an auxiliary. So the daughters were cast to the wolves. Exodus 21:7-9 dictated specifications for fathers selling daughters into slavery when they could.

If a man’s “soul is not satisfied with goodness,” which would seem to include most of us, “a stillborn child is better than he” (Ecclesiastes 6:3).

Whoever has ears, let them hear. (Matthew 11:15)

Michael Ireland

Parkersburg